# WordPress, Shopify or a Custom Site: How to Choose in Israel > WordPress vs Shopify vs a custom site for an Israeli business: running costs, the payments question, Shopify plan break-even, and what to check. - Web page: https://sporesec.com/en/blog/wordpress-shopify-or-custom-site-israel - Language: English - Last updated: 2026-10-17 - Also in עברית: https://sporesec.com/he/blog/wordpress-shopify-or-custom-site-israel.md ## Answer WordPress vs Shopify vs a custom site for an Israeli business: running costs, the payments question, Shopify plan break-even, and what to check. - By Mahdy Lorens Gribkov - Published: 2026-07-22 - Revised: 2026-10-17 - Websites, 6 min read - Keywords: WordPress vs Shopify Israel, Shopify Payments Israel, Shopify third-party transaction fee, build a website Israel, WooCommerce or Shopify Choose Shopify if you sell products and want checkout, inventory and shipping handled in one product. Choose WordPress if the site is mainly pages, services and a blog that you want to own and extend. Choose a custom build only when your site is really software, with logic that no platform covers. For an Israeli business there is one extra thing to check before you commit to Shopify, and it is about how you take payments. Here is the decision in order, with the break-even arithmetic that most comparisons skip. ### What are you actually selling? Start from the business, not the platform. - **A service business with a few pages, a contact form and a blog.** WordPress fits. The content is the product, and you want to edit it easily. - **A store with a catalogue, variants, stock and shipping.** Shopify is built for this. WooCommerce, a store plugin inside WordPress, is the alternative when you already run a WordPress site or want everything under your own control. - **A product with accounts, dashboards or custom pricing rules.** That is software. A platform will fight you at every step, and a custom build is the honest answer. ### What does each cost to run, besides the build? Every platform has running costs that are not in the quote for building it. - **Shopify** bills its plan to you directly, in US dollars. Its pricing page (as captured on 14 June 2026) lists Basic at 29 dollars a month, Grow at 79 and Advanced at 299 when paid yearly, and 39, 105 and 399 when paid monthly. Plus starts at 2,300 dollars a month. The page says there are no setup fees on any plan. - **WordPress** itself is free software. Its license file says it is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or, at your option, any later version. You still pay for hosting, a domain, a premium theme or plugins where you choose them, and someone to keep it updated. - **Custom builds** have no license fee, and carry a larger build cost and the cost of maintaining the code. ### What is the payments question for an Israeli Shopify store? Shopify's own payment service, Shopify Payments, is not available everywhere. Shopify's Help Center page on supported countries (as archived on 16 January 2026) says it is "available only to stores in the countries listed on this page", and that list does not include Israel. For a country that is not listed, the page says you need to select another payment gateway. So an Israeli Shopify store takes payments through an outside payment provider, and Shopify adds a third-party transaction fee on every order: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus. That fee is on top of whatever the payment provider charges. Check the list again before you commit, because Shopify can add countries. That fee changes which plan is cheapest. Here is the arithmetic from Shopify's own yearly-billing figures, ignoring card and provider charges, which are the same on every plan: - **Basic to Grow.** The plan costs 50 dollars a month more and the fee falls by 1 percentage point. Grow is cheaper once monthly sales through the store pass about 5,000 dollars. - **Grow to Advanced.** The plan costs 220 dollars a month more and the fee falls by 0.4 points. Advanced is cheaper once monthly sales pass about 55,000 dollars. Those are break-even points, not recommendations. They show why a store with real volume should price the whole chain before deciding: the Shopify plan, the payment provider's fees and the third-party transaction fee. Ask whoever quotes the build to show all three. ### What should you check on any platform? 1. **Hebrew and right-to-left.** Open the actual theme or template in Hebrew and look at the menu, the forms, the checkout and numbers inside sentences. A theme that is "translated" is not the same as one built right-to-left. 2. **Ownership.** The domain, the hosting account and the store account should be in your name. If you cannot log in to the dashboard that holds your site, it is not fully yours. 3. **Accessibility.** According to Internet Society Israel's guide (updated 16 January 2024), a site that must comply has to meet Israeli standard IS 5568 at level AA at least. The guide says the duty depends on when the site was launched and on the business's annual revenue, and that an exemption can be requested for a severe economic burden. Whether your business is covered is a question for a specialist, not for a platform comparison. Ask the builder what they test and how. 4. **After launch.** Who updates it, who restores it if it breaks, and what it costs per month. Ask for this in writing. ### What does it cost with us? Our floors, each fixed per scope, plus VAT as required by law: a website designed with AI from ₪7,000, a Shopify store from ₪7,500, a WordPress business site from ₪8,500, a WooCommerce store from ₪11,000, and a fully custom build from ₪25,000. Shopify bills its own plan and fees to you directly. Hosting is billed by your provider. Ongoing care is optional, monthly and cancellable. See the pages for [WordPress](https://sporesec.com/en/services/wordpress), [Shopify](https://sporesec.com/en/services/shopify), [WooCommerce](https://sporesec.com/en/services/woocommerce) and [custom builds](https://sporesec.com/en/services/custom-builds), or [book a free intro call](https://sporesec.com/en/book) and tell us what you sell. We will say which one fits, including when the answer is a cheaper option than the one you asked about. ### Sources - [Shopify pricing](https://www.shopify.com/pricing), as captured by Common Crawl on 14 June 2026. - [Supported countries for Shopify Payments, Shopify Help Center](https://web.archive.org/web/20260116173155/https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/shopify-payments/supported-countries), Wayback Machine snapshot of 16 January 2026. - [WordPress license file](https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/6f3dd65fd4c25b34f9947fec9e741221ec5de3b9/license.txt), as committed on 9 July 2026. - [All about accessibility, Internet Society Israel](https://www.isoc.org.il/freedom-of-internet/accessibility/all-about-accessibility), page last updated 16 January 2024. ## Questions and answers ### Does Shopify charge extra if I use another payment provider? Yes. Shopify's pricing page (captured 14 June 2026) lists a third-party transaction fee when you do not use Shopify Payments: 2% on Basic, 1% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced and 0.2% on Plus, on top of the provider's own charges. The supported-countries page on Shopify Help Center, archived on 16 January 2026, does not list Israel for Shopify Payments. ### Is WordPress free? The software is. Its license file says it is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or any later version. You still pay for hosting, a domain, any paid theme or plugin, and the person who keeps it updated and restores it if something breaks. ### When is a custom build the right choice? When the site is really software: accounts, dashboards or pricing rules that no platform covers. For a catalogue or a content site, a platform is usually cheaper to build and to run, and a custom build then buys you maintenance you do not need. ## Next step - Book a free intro call: https://sporesec.com/en/book.md - Blog: https://sporesec.com/en/blog.md --- - Contact: contact@sporesec.com | WhatsApp https://wa.me/972532322318 | https://sporesec.com/en/contact.md - Book a free intro call: https://sporesec.com/en/book.md - Machine-readable site data: https://sporesec.com/llms.txt | https://sporesec.com/agents/en/index.json